I wanted to get Analytics set up on the shadowrun wiki, to do this I knew there were several options. I chose the fastest of using Google Analytics. This also helped in making this process much simpler than it would have otherwise been. I had to do a google search for Google Analytics since it was not showing in my app selection for google itself. But with it being the first result that was probably faster than trying to find it in google apps.

I originally wanted to stick with this idea, however I realized that I would need to do a lot of work to make the wiki site compliant with EU law on the mater of personal data. With this in mind I started looking at other solutions. Knowing what pages are being visited to the most is important, however I don't need to know anything else besides this. With this in mind, I did more research and came across a github project called Shynet. This project being a privacy focused web analytics tool, I thought would be perfect for this task. I installed in on a Raspberry pi to start testing it. This took some time to figure out how I could integrate it in Mediawiki. I had already found a working method for using Google analytics, however this would be different.

Shynet provides you the ability to turn off ip data collection from the server side as it pulls a javascript file from it every time the page is loaded. Between the ability to change those settings on the server side so it can update the script and the fact that all of the data is locally stored and not stored where it can be sold to data brokers. After finding a temporary solution where I install the javascript as a customjs page in mediawiki, I set out to figure out how to have the script pulled from the server as well as it all run as an extension for mediawiki.

I did this by forking the google analytics extension I found, modifying the little bit of code that was there for use with what shynet would hand the user. It tooks some test deployments to get it to work correctly. Turns out some of the issue was DNS related, as it always ends up being. The forked repo can be found here: https://github.com/catrone3/mediawiki-shynet

After all of this testing, this is what I now have showing up in my Shynet instance:

This gives me exactly what I am looking for. I had left all settings as default for testing, this is why the geo locations are showing up. With it now being live, I have set it to ignore robots, not collect IPs and honor DNT requests. I am happy with how this is working at this point. Next is to work on making the setup even more secure by cleaning up any holes I may have poked in it with this work. That will be done before this is published

Setting up Analytics